Searching the Past to Understand the Future

Art

07/22/2013

BattleTech was my intro to the world, but it wasn’t my only outlet. Still, it was my primary vehicle for understanding the simple idea that giant mechanical battlesuits punching things in the face are awesome. I don’t know when, exactly, it began, but I do know it started with a copy of CityTech. I didn’t read the rules the first time I tried playing and, as such, I had no fucking clue what was going on. Still, I was hooked on the idea of BattleMechs.

The ‘90s were not necessarily a good time to be in love with that sort of thing. I read all of the BattleTech novels and I filled my imagination with the ‘Mechs and their MechWarriors. When I was in eighth grade English class we were supposed to journal our thoughts at the beginning of class every day. Instead I wrote the origin story of the Goliath Marauders,[1] my Inner Sphere mercenary unit. It was pure fanfic, but it did lead me to write the sci-fi company that published the BattleTech novels and attempt to get published. I received a form letter with highlighter marks indicating the important parts.

I never wrote that BattleTech book. I mean, I started it, but I never finished it.[2] I can say that about a lot of other things I’ve done since then.

When it came to the wider world nothing quite lived up to my imagination. I fondly recall Robot Jox and Robot Wars, which were about the closest anything came to living up to my BattleMech dreams. I watched the BattleTech cartoon and EXO Squad. As I got older and computer games were more of a thing there were the MechWarrior and MechCommander games, which were pretty good but still…blocky and somewhat less than immersive.[3]

I briefly got into Gundam, but I’ll just lay this out right now: anime isn’t my thing. I’ve seen enough to know what’s going on but, for whatever reason, I never wanted to get too far into that world. Why? I don’t know. Life’s like that sometimes, y’know?

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I’ve known about Pacific Rim for the better part of a year.

From the moment I learned about it I wanted to know more. I watched every trailer I could find. I watched them all multiple times. I went to the website and clicked on every link I could find, hoping in vain to see more.

I knew three things: there were monsters, there were humongous mecha, and the monsters and humongous mecha punched each other in the face. I was in love.

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The entire Godzilla genre passed me by almost entirely.

I wasn’t that interested in movies that featured guys in rubber suits stepping on cardboard cities. Still the weird cross-cultural-contamination that comes from life as a geek left me aware of the genre and its attendant tropes. Some of it came from MST3K. Some of it came from that episode of Arrested Development where they were trying to convince the Japanese investors that Sudden Valley had more than a single model home. Some came from reading what other geeks who did care had written about the movies about giant monsters destroying Tokyo.

That’s the great thing about life as a geek. I cared about BattleTech. I knew that BattleTech came from RoboTech and Super Macross and all that, but I didn’t have to care. I knew that BattleTech shared a sort of cultural niche with Godzilla but I didn’t have to care. I dreamed of BattleMechs and I knew that other people dreamed about Godzilla and we could all have our own dreams.

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I knew that Pacific Rim had nothing to do with my beloved BattleTech.

When I dreamed of humongous mecha I dreamed about piloting a Battlemaster and leading a company, battalion, or regiment against another similar unit comprised of similar humans piloting similar machines. My world of humongous mecha didn’t fight monsters. They fought other humans with their own goals, desires, dreams, and plans.

When I dreamed of humongous mecha I dreamed of people who became monsters to fight other humans who also became monsters.

As such, there’s absolutely no reason why I should have waited for Pacific Rim with the sort of taught, active anticipation that marked the past few months of my life.

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The older you get the more you learn that anticipation is the enemy. At least, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve learned that anticipation is the enemy. Anticipation leads to expectation. Expectation leads to overestimation. Overestimation leads to disappointment.

I’ve learned to make expectation management a key component of all things I do.

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I was in Dallas a couple weeks back. The week before I was going to be down in Dallas I was walking out of Ogilvie Transportation Center on my way to the office when a bus passed with an advertisement for Pacific Rim. I put two and two together and sent my friend who lives there a text with a simple query, “You know what’s happening on July 12th?” It meant we could go see Pacific Rim when I was in Dallas.

I wasn’t practicing expectation management. I’d thrown all caution to the wind and decided that Pacific Rim was the greatest thing ever and no matter what happened it would be everything I wanted it to be and more. I was in a dangerous place.

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In the car on the way back to my hotel my friend started picking the movie apart. There were all kinds of problems with the film, mostly because there were any number of things that made absolutely no sense. His biggest problem, though, was that the movie didn’t engage in anything even remotely resembling character development.

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I realized a few years back that the most important story is the one that doesn’t get told. I was working on a novel and I had a character I loved and who had a crazy-ass backstory that I wanted to tell. I didn’t tell it. I described the character and made sure that I gave enough details to explain who he was and why he was in that place and doing the thing he was doing and decided to leave the rest up to whoever happened to read the book.[4]

Not telling the entire story is an act of faith. It invites a compact with the audience to say, “I’m not going to tell you everything and I’m going to trust that you’ll realize that this character is as awesome as I think they are.” Too little entertainment today asks the audience to make that compact. It’s sad, really.

In not telling the entire story the storyteller invited the audience to live in the world. He or she says, “Come, join me. There’s a giant universe here filled with stories as yet untold. Let’s tell those stories together.”

I tried to explain the concept to my friend while we were in the car. I saw Pacific Rim as a masterpiece of storytelling. It had a specific story to tell and a collection of characters who needed to drive that story forward. Those characters arrived fully formed and played out their roles on the screen. They were a bit cartoonish and stock, yes, but the story itself was cartoonish and stock.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to realize it’s possible for a thing to be both a masterpiece and a cartoonish, stock story. When you walk in expecting to see a big budget story about humongous mecha punching giant monsters in the face it’s easier, though. I wasn’t expecting Pacific Rim to approach the enduring cultural level of, say, The Great Gatsby. I did want to see something that was the ultimate culmination of all of my fantasies about giant robots punching shit in the face.

On that Pacific Rim delivered. Oh, my god, did Pacific Rim deliver.

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Friday night I was talking to one of my old professors. The conversation had turned to movies and I’d just launched into my explanation of why Pacific Rim is a brilliant movie. I was in full-on geek mode and it quickly became obvious that my full-on geekery was amusing the hell out of him.

I should point out that by that time I’d seen Pacific Rim again in glorious IMAX 3D. I’m not a big fan of 3D movies, but I am a huge fan of IMAX and I knew I had to see Pacific Rim in the big format before it was gone.

I’ll admit that I was worried. Guillermo del Toro was talking about Pacific Rim 2, but the box office was talking about, well, Grown-Ups 2. So I went to see Pacific Rim in glorious IMAX 3D as a sort of act of desperation. It seemed that people didn’t respond to the movie like I had. Why? I don’t know. Maybe no one else cares about humongous mecha punching shit in the face. Those people are sad, sad people.

They used a rocket elbow. Did I mention the rocket elbow? Rocket elbow. ROCKET. ELBOW.

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I geeked out about Pacific Rim to my dad. By that point it wasn’t just the humongous mecha rocket elbowing giant monsters in the face angle. I’d had my mind blown by the sheer technical beauty of the glorious IMAX 3D presentation.

He was surprised. He told me that the critics weren’t exactly on board. I was confused. I convinced my dad to go to the Sunday matinee showing in glorious IMAX 3D.

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As we walked out of the theater I said, “So…was that not awesome?”

He replied with, “I realized a few minutes in that the trick is to not think about it too much.”

My dad got it in one.

I say this as someone who has now seen Pacific Rim three times. I’ve devoted way too much brain space to Pacific Rim over the past…however many months it’s been a thing. I’ve just now written nearly two thousand words on the subject.

I say this as someone who intends to go see Pacific Rim one more time in glorious IMAX 3D. There are some things that require no thought. There are some things that require a lot of thought. There are some things that are best if they’re only thought about in anticipation or in review.

Pacific Rim doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. The entire movie is basically the perfect storm of fridge logic and rule of cool. But it’s both earnest enough to pull it off and silly enough to let you know that, yes, everyone involved is aware of the absurdity of the entire exercise. It’s also brilliantly done from a technological perspective. I avoid 3D like the plague but this movie has single-handedly convinced me to reconsider that stance. Even in the regular old 2D non-IMAX format the cinematography is brilliant.

The biggest thing, though, is that at no point does the movie screw up the scale. That’s the hardest bit to pull off in something like this. The Kaiju and Jaegers are always unfathomably large and never feel like anything remotely human in scale. That’s the thing that strikes me every time I see the movie.

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Pacific Rim is brilliant. You should go see it, preferably in glorious IMAX 3D before Friday, when it will be replaced by The Wolverine.

But when you get there do yourself a favor: don’t think about it too much.

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[1]When I say “fanfic” I mean that in the purest sense. The Goliath Marauders were named after the BattleMechs piloted by the two founders of the unit, who were members of the Gray Death Legion left for dead during the Clan Invasion. Said founders were also, if I recall, me and my best friend.

[2]I basically took the Goliath Marauders story I’d already created and moved it around. I think I figured out at a very early age that fanfic isn’t actually a good idea, but that if I made it more generalized I had a winning idea. So I moved the key elements and made my ragtag band of Clan survivors into a Draconis Combine unit caught by the Smoke Jaguars or Ghost Bears. It probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere no matter what happened, though, since I totally missed out on a lot of the development in the larger BattleTech universe and had the unit equipped with stuff that they simply shouldn’t have had at the time. In my defense I was, like, fourteen.

[3]MechCommander 2 remains one of my all-time favorite games. A couple years ago I revisited the cartoon universes. The BattleTech Saturday morning cartoon was awful. EXO Squad held up surprisingly well.

09/21/2012

So, I had a couple posts worked up to a nice frothy lather but decided they weren't going anywhere. That's probably for the best, I think.

Also, too, I'd decided to make a half-assed closing to my Group Dynamics series, as I just kind of ran out of steam on the idea and wasn't expressing what I wanted to express in any sort of serious way. It kept descending into polemics and the concrete, which was more-or-less the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I mean, yes, sometimes the concrete is necessary, but oftentimes the concrete gets in the way of the things that actually matter.

And so but anyway, I've finally (FINALLY!) gotten around to reading seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, Lawrence Weschler's luminous biography of Robert Irwin. Irwin has focused his entire career on questions of perception and presence and removing the image from art in order to leave only the interaction between the art and the self.

As it happens, sometimes I find myself reading the exact right thing for the exact right moment in time. Were I still a Christian I would call it providence. These days, though, I just call it "convergence," that wonderful term of art given me by Lawrence Weschler himself. Either way, I found myself trying to figure out if there was any way that I, as a writer, could make use of Robert Irwin's ideas and lessons. I was confounded by the question, but did realize that he provided an answer of another sort to a different question, specifically the question of why I saw such great convergence between the Christianity I'd departed and the atheism from which I am beginning my departure.

Anyway, amongst its many brilliant lines, Weschler's book contains this quote from Robert Irwin:

After the Whitney, I might have just disappeared, and in a way that would have been nice. But as it turns out, I couldn't. And maybe it's for the same reason I've never been comfortable with the argument from certain spiritual quarters about enlightenment. I don't doubt that those people devoted to Zen and yoga, the krishnas and all of them, do attain an altered state of consciousness, that they are in a different place, and in a sense a nicer place. But this is not an enlightened world. And the world always draws you back. [emphasis his]

09/20/2011

Specifically, let’s talk why that which we separate off from the world at large seems so inaccessible. Let’s talk about why it seems so hard to understand. Actually, those two thoughts are almost impossible to separate. So, instead, I’ll…crap. How do I do this?

The reason that “high” art seems to remote and complicated – at least if we set aside that there are people who see setting art apart from the hoi polloi as a virtue – is that art has its own language. I’m not talking about language in terms of vocabulary and grammar, although art has that, too. I’m talking about language in terms of communication, memory, and nuance.

It actually helps to think of art as language. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a native speaker of English who has never in your life learned a word of a different language. Through some contrivance you end up in a room full of German speakers. You would, I assume, find this intimidating.

German would be completely foreign to you. Perhaps it would be alien. Strange, guttural syllables would flow unstopping from the mouths of a room full of strangers, at once pushing you out and alienating you.

If you don’t run out of the room immediately, though, you might begin to notice something. At first you might note that there is most definitely a rhythm, purpose, and structure to the language. Once you grew accustomed to it you might further note that German shares several words with English. Eventually you might even begin to get the gist of what’s going on in some of the conversations.

Of course, it would help if you had a tutor. Fortunately, those are available, if you know where to look.

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Now, the problem with art as opposed to, say, German, is that art is an almost entirely subjective language. Words have a fairly narrow range of possible meaning, so if you get the basic word you can understand how to use it. True, there is the problem of wordplay, ironic usage, slang, and whatnot. But if you can get the rules and definitions down chances are that you can get the alternate usages without too much difficulty, too.

The language of art, on the other hand, is an infinitely complex variation on motif and theme, a building on past terms and nuances in order to create present meaning and future purpose. Also, those variations are entirely dependent on how the artist sees them. Since there is no really way for the uninitiated to know what the artist was thinking or how the artist was influenced, it can make the language seem densely impossible.

That is where the self-appointed gatekeepers of higher culture come in to play. The fact that art looks so complicated allows them to be possessors of the gnosis of art. They get to separate themselves and look down their noses at the madding crowd with its lack of appreciation for the finer things in life. Everyone likes to be important, after all.

But here’s the thing: the language of art is actually surprisingly easy to pick up on. Chances are that anyone who has ever consumed popular music knows exactly how to speak the language. Musicians speak in terms of influences all the time.

Say the only band you’ve ever heard about is Oasis. You love Oasis. You listen to Oasis constantly.

One day you read an article about Oasis. That article talks about Oasis’s influences. All of the sudden you learn that there is a band out there called the Beatles and another called the Velvet Underground and a third called the Jam. Studying further you learn about the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Ride. So you set out to get music by all of those bands. You listen for a while and realize that there are a bunch of things in Oasis songs that are similar to things in songs by those other bands. But you also realize that there are things that are different.

Believe it or not, but that’s all that is required to understand art.

Anyone who knows about the history of music knows that it’s a long story about interrelation, influence, and collaboration. Take any modern rock band and follow their influences back. You’ll eventually reach the Beatles and Elvis. Go back from there and you’ll hit jazz. Go back from there and you’ll eventually hit Mozart and so on until you’re at the first caveman who realized that he could make pleasing hooting noises.

The great thing about this, too, is that you don’t actually have to know anything whatsoever about music in order to do this. You don’t have to be able to play an instrument, write a song, or carry a tune. You just have to be curious.

Moreover, you don’t have to worry about liking the right music. You just have to like something. And, yes, getting in to art is really that simple.

Walk in to an art museum somewhere. Look around for something that you find interesting. Look for something, in short, that you like. Soak in the details. Then find something else you like. Soak in the details. Keep doing that until you’re tired or have to go to an appointment or something. But don’t – and this is key – forget what you liked and why you liked it. Because you’re not done yet.

See, now that you’re interested in some bit of art the next trick is to go study it. Find out why the artist made it, find out who that artist’s influences were. Then go look at some more art.

If you’re feeling really frisky, go find some art you don’t like. Study it. Ask yourself why. Then find out about that art, too. You might discover that your reasons for disliking it are based on a lack of understanding of intent and style. You might find you appreciate it in spite of the fact that you dislike it.

That happens. It’s good.

Now that you’ve picked up a few things in this language known as art the next step is to find a tutor.

I recommend Lawrence Weschler, personally. His magnificent Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences taught me more about art than several semesters of humanities classes, precisely because he wrote a book about how to look at and understand art, instead of writing a book that was just about art. He’s like Art 101 and a graduate-level seminar on the subject all rolled in to one ecstatically brilliant and wonderfully written package.

I also strongly recommend finding a copy of Simon Schama’s Power of Art, a BBC program from a few years ago. It picks eight pieces of art and tells the story behind them, creating a narrative scaffolding to explain where art comes from. Art doesn’t just pop in to existence, after all. It is the product of a time and place and person.

If you start there you will, of course, be given the option of following any number of additional paths.

09/18/2011

Wait, no, let’s back up a bit. I was on a train, reading Lawrence Weschler’s Uncanny Valley. This got me thinking about trains and art and writing about trains and art.

In the process of doing that I wandered off, as I am prone to do, especially when considering Weschler’s own wanderings, and decided to attempt to explain why I don’t see a real, useful distinction between so-called “high” and so-called “low” art.

It’s almost impossible for me, a child of Calvin & Hobbes, to think about this subject without considering this particular comic strip:

So, anyway, I was in Madison, Wisconsin, trying to get out of the rain.

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art rose, prow-like from across the intersection, so I decided to go in. I’d been thinking about art, after all. I’d just finished (but, not really, as it turns out) writing a post about how art shouldn’t be intimidating, as it’s really just a language and the best way to learn about art is to go expose yourself to some art and learn the language.

I decided to do just that.

The main gallery at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at the moment is dedicated to the Chicago Imagists, a collection of artists who drew inspiration from the so-called “low” art, up to and including – wait for it now – comic books.

So what did I find when I entered the main gallery? A set of prints by Ray Yoshida. Specifically, they were prints made up of figures from comic books.